124 HE THEATItE ,!t f!? A I . $ O J ' I ' JUGGE.R.NAUT N o doubt a volume as stout as "\Var and Peace" could be written about the lamentable mIsadventures of "1600 Pennsylvania A venue," a musical with book and lyr- ics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Leonard Bernstein. After many months of well-publicized anguish on the road, it opened last week at the Mark Hel- linger to adverse reviews, gave seven performances, and expired. A question often asked about instant Broadway failures on so grand a scale-" 1600 Pennsylvania A venue" is said to have cost a million and a quarter dollars- is why the producers (in this case l<.oger L. Stevens and Robert White- head, who are among the most intelli- gent and experienced theatre men alive) didn't give them an early quietus out of town. As far as I can tell, the answer to the question is that musical productions are juggernauts, and once set in motion are almost impossible to halt. Contracts having been signed with authors, cOlnposers, and perhaps one or two of the leading performers, a dozen related enterprises are launched, most of them by their nature irreversible. Sets are being designed and built, cos- tumes are being designed and sewn, theatres are being leased out of town and in N ew York, theatre parties are being booked, optimistic newspaper and magazine interviews are being pub- lished, and a point is reached where, how- ever beclouded the prospect, the invest- ment not merely of money but of talent, energy, and time has been so great that it be- comes tempting finan- cially as well as emo- tionally to go for broke. Moreover, by then an ill-controlled hy steria of hope is likely to have rQ infected all parties; ex- _ amples of musicals that were in desperate trou- ble in New Haven and su bseq u en tly became smash hits in New York are recited like pious incantations. I n- creasingly drastic changes are made, which even the coolest heads find it in- creasingly hard to pass sound judgment on Faster and faster, the juggernaut plunges downhill to its doom. What puzzles me about "1600 Pennsylvania A venue" isn't why it was brought to town when it was so man- ifestly unfit to survive here but what anyone found attractive in it to be- gin with. A musical about a hundred years of life in the White House, with emphasis on the black servants who waited on all those generations of white masters-how could that help but prove a repellent pastiche of "D pstairs, Downstairs"? As for the gimmick that all the Presidents be played by a single actor and all the wives by a single actress, surely even John and Ethel Barrymore couldn't have brought that off (though, in a rowdier and less pre- tentious musical, Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman might have taken a crack at it). 1 he actor chosen was Ken How- ard, who is a pleasant performer but lacks fire, and the actress chosen was PatÓcia Routledge, who IS also pleasant an d also lacks fi re To make matte rs worse, Mr. Howard is exceptionally tall and some of the Presidents he played-Adams, Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt-were, by our standards, ex- ceptionally short. Howard crouched a good deal, but in vain A clue to the innumerable things MAY I 7 , 1 9 7 b that must have gone wrong In the course of preparing "1600 Pennsyl- vania Avenue" is the program credIt stating that the scenery was "super- vised" by Kert Lundell and that the costumes were "supervised" by Whit- ney Blausen and Dona Granata. Sure- ly someone had to design the scenery and costumes before they could be supervised? The lighting was by Thar- on Musser, and the production was di- rected and choreographed by Gilbert Moses and George Faison. M ADELEINE RENA D, Jean-Pierre Aumont, FrançoIse Dorner, and Jean Martin have been spending a few days at the Ambassador, In a limited engagement, given in French, of Mar- . D ''' D J ' E guerlte uras s es ournees n- tières dans les Arbres," which I'll translate freely as "All Day Long in the Trees," or, better still, as "Old Mom and Her Favorite Kid, a Lazy Loner with Nothing Much on His Mind." The little company obviously enjoys performing the play, which is an examination of family life on a level not of the deepest, or saddest, or most acute. After a five-year absence, a mother comes to PaÓs to visit her son, who lives with a young girl friend and earns a poor living as a host in a night club. The mother, who IS wealthy, says she is getting ready to die; neverthe- less, she eats ravenously and gives ev- ery indication of continuing to relish life. Mother and son turn out to have no more to say to each other than they ever did; she is a born winner and he is a born loser and so he was her favorite and so he was bound to dis- appoint her. 'Vhen she dies, the only thing of value belonging to him, which 2